James Earl Jones, renowned for his iconic voice work as Darth Vader and his impressive stage presence on Broadway, overcame a stutter and several “mute years” during his childhood.
In a 1996 interview for his induction into the American Academy of Achievement, Jones discussed his upbringing in Mississippi and Michigan and how his family’s move affected his stutter, which left him largely nonverbal until high school, as reported by PEOPLE.
“It wasn’t that I stopped talking; it was that I resolved that talking was too difficult,” Jones said in that interview, noting that traveling north with his grandparents, who raised him, and away from Mississippi was a significant trauma for him.
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“By the time I got to Michigan, I was a stutterer. I couldn’t talk,” he recalled. “So my first year of school was my first mute year. And then those mute years continued until I got to high school.”
In 1996, despite his global fame for voice roles in Star Wars and The Lion King, as well as his Tony-winning Broadway career, Jones revealed he still struggled with stuttering.
He speculated that many people with stutters manage to overcome or conceal it. “I suspect a lot of people are stutterers and somehow overcome it or we all mask it.”
“I resigned to it as a kid,” he said. “I guess I was then about 10 years old when I was approaching serious school work, where you really had to report what you knew. The teacher accepted that I could do all my reporting with a pencil; I didn’t have to speak oral examinations, I did all mine written. And I became just a nonverbal person. I became a writer.”
Jones, who preferred silence and valued being left undisturbed, credited high school English teacher Donald Crouch with helping him regain his verbal communication skills. Crouch recognized Jones’ interest in poetry and used it to encourage him to speak again.
“He said, ‘Do you like these words? Do you like the way they sound in your head?’ ” Jones recalled. “He said, ‘Well, they sound 10 times better when you give them out in the air. It’s too bad you can’t say these words.’ He began to challenge and nudge me toward speaking again, and by using my own poetry and then other poets … he nudged me toward that, toward acknowledging and appreciating the beauty of words.”
In a 2008 interview, Jones recalled how teacher Crouch used Jones’ own poetry to encourage him to speak publicly, challenging him to dictate his words in front of the class.
“He said, ‘This is a good poem, it’s so good I don’t think you wrote it. To prove you wrote it, get up in front of the class and say it out loud,’ ” Jones recalled. “I don’t know whether he concocted that challenge or not, but he really meant it. And I got up and I said it and didn’t stutter. Nice surprise.”
Jones passed away at age 93 on September 9 at his home in Dutchess County, New York.
